


Impressions

by XmagicalX (Xparrot)



Category: Stargate (1994), Stargate SG-1
Genre: First Meetings, Gen, Missing Scene, POV First Person
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2001-07-21
Updated: 2001-07-21
Packaged: 2017-10-09 15:13:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 892
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/88757
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Xparrot/pseuds/XmagicalX
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>Missing scene for the movie.</i> The beginning of it all.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Impressions

**Author's Note:**

> Merely a short, short exploration of a key meeting. Draws on ideas described in my story ["Star-Crossed"](http://archiveofourown.org/works/88755) but is not really related except in that concept.

I don't know _what_ it was. The first time I saw him...I walked into the room and he was hunched over the blackboard, scribbling something in white chalk. He straightened up, looked past the gawking eggheads to me. Our eyes met, and...

I don't _know_. It was like I'd been seeing him in my dreams my entire life, though I knew I'd never dreamed his face. If someone that second had told me that Daniel Jackson was my long-lost twin, separated at birth, I would have believed it. Never mind the eleven years' difference in age, or that we look nothing alike. There was something there. Relation. What he was to me...what I was to him—because he felt it, too, I could see it in his eyes. I could read every feeling in his soul like they were my own. Like I was born to it.

Then he began to talk, and I was introduced, and it was over. I forgot it ever happened—pretended to forget. Bury it in routine and a soldier's ingrained, knee-jerk reactions to a civilian geek, never looked deeper. Except late at night, after the nightmares come, those dark hours when I sort through the tangle of my life to find a thread I can follow to the future, a reason to stay one more day alive. When that single string vibrates to remind me of what I still have to unravel, what I can't leave unsolved.

It wasn't love at first sight; I know what that's like. It wasn't understanding, it wasn't animosity, though it seemed like all of that, at one time or another. Certainly not friendship—I'd had friends, lots of them, most of them in the military, fellow soldiers. This wasn't like that. Wasn't family either, because I'd had a family, and the ache of its loss burned too deeply for me ever to forget.

I don't know what it was, but I'll tell you this. For all I'd ever seen, for all I'd done and was forced to do, I never believed in fate. I never believed in destiny, until the day I walked into that room and saw Daniel Jackson, and knew that regardless of the coincidences and circumstances which had moved us there, the two of us being at that place, at that time, was as inevitable as the slow expansion of the universe, as certain as a drop of rain's return to the sea.

 

* * *

I heard someone enter the room, and when I looked up I was certain I must have heard two sets of footsteps. Someone besides this hard-faced man before me—a captain? A general? I could read five forms of Egyptian hieroglyphics but the military insignia still stymied me.

Only he was there, no one behind him or beside him...no one I recognized, and yet there was familiarity. Like a scent from childhood that you don't recall until you smell it again, and then everything floods back to you about that day.

But I didn't know this man, with the rock-solid set to his jaw and his cold, cold black eyes. Colonel Jack O'Neill, I was informed, and I had never heard the name before. Except that looking at him, I knew exactly what he'd look like if he smiled. Even if his mouth was flattened so tight it looked as if it would shatter before curving.

Maybe at one time I would have tried to get him to grin. At one time I knew I would have cared, that he looked like his heart had been torn open. I used to care. I used to try to stop pain, but it never worked, and finally I learned to ignore it. I'd hurt my friends, walking away from them. For their own good, distancing myself before I dragged them down, too. I think at one time I wouldn't have been able to leave them, seeing the pain in their eyes. But I was smarter now, older. Growing up is all about learning to live with pain. You figure out how to pick your battles, how to prioritize. Can't care about everyone. It will only rip you apart.

And this man was a stranger, and a soldier. I knew what he must think of me, with my glasses and my long hair, and my attitude...but in the long run it's easier to laugh off an insult than to take offense. Bow and bend, learn to deal. No one else cares; why should you? No one is going to say anything about the blackness devouring this man before me. Even if they can see the agony turning his eyes to stone. None of their business.

Stone sinks. He's drowning. And letting the waves wash over his head, not reaching for help he knows won't be offered. He's learned his own lessons about the world.

I should mind my own business. These symbols are my problem. This translation. Besides our common employer he has nothing to do with me.

And yet...I look back to the blackboard but I can still feel his freezing gaze on me. Can still see his face, like an afterimage burned on my retina.

And even though I shouldn't care, I'm wondering if his smile would really look like the one I shouldn't remember, beaming in my mind's eye.


End file.
